Last wave of the set displaying the tell tale mosaic of froth and foam on the face, churned up by earlier breakers only seconds before. Frozen by shutter speed miracle, graceful rider set in marbled gestalt.
photo provided by Surfing Nosara
Blog
Alfonso Chase
Alfonso Chase is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer, as well as a Professor of Literature at the Universided Nacional de Costa Rica. He has edited a two-volume survey of Costa Rican fiction, La narrative contemporanea de Costa Rica, and has authored many works including the novels Los juegos furtivos, Las puertas de la noche, and El pavo real y la mariposa. His short story, “Faust in Hatillo,” appears in Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion.
“Faust in Hatillo” details a strange encounter with an unusual man. Faust, who owns a shoe repair shop, is listening to threats from his wife to make “a soup out of boots, slippers, moccasins, topsiders, whatever” because his customers have not come to pay for the repairs to their shoes. It is then that the indescribable stranger appears and asks Faust to repair his sandal, which is made of the finest leather. Faust repairs the shoe as he listens to the stranger talk. The stranger seems to be reading his mind, though Faust cannot tell if he has even opened his mouth. Nevertheless, the stranger holds Faust under a spell, and when he leaves, he pays handsomely for the repair. What Faust does with this payment will change his life. In this story, Chase introduces the everyday problems of the working class while painting a portrait of the ways that strangers unexpectedly enter our lives and teach us about ourselves.
Photo Credit: La Nacion
Source: Ras, Barbara, ed. Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. San Francisco: Whereabouts, 1994.
SURFING IS… WITH LARS MERSEBURG
German-born surfer Lars Merseburg would live in the water if he could. “It’s my favorite place,” he says. “I wish I could breathe underwater.”
In reality, Merseburg, a former competitive swimmer, splits his time between Montauk, Long Island and New York City, where he runs Imagine Swimming, the school he co-founded with his business partner Casey Barrett in 2002.
“At Imagine we enjoy sharing our love for the water,” he says of teaching Manhattan’s young city dwellers how to swim. “Our main goal is not to produce competitive swimmers, but to empower children with skills to be happy and comfortable in any body of water – to love it and respect it, and enjoy any aquatic environment they choose.”
Merseburg– who competed for Germany in the 1990s – grew up swimming and skateboarding. At 20, he went to Hourtin Plage, on the French Atlantic coast, and tried surfing for the first time. “I quickly realized that surfing was the best combination of everything I loved,” says Merseburg, who soon after moved to California to attend University of Berkeley on a swimming scholarship. He’s been learning to surf ever since.
While a fan of surfing Costa Rica (Pavones) and El Salvador (Las Flores), his ultimate surf destination is Jeffreys Bay, South Africa. “Supertubes may be the most perfectly shaped wave on the planet,” says Merseburg, who met his wife Annabel, a South African, at a charity event in New York several years ago. The pair now surf together in Montauk, sometimes even with their 4-year-old, Oskar, who sits on the end of a big foam board, but prefers bodysurfing in the shore break.
An avid traveler, Merseburg – who recently returned from Brazil where he watched Germany win the World Cup final – has his sights set on the South Pacific for a family surf trip.
But for Merseburg, the ocean will always be seen as a powerful, sobering force deserving of our utmost reverence. “The sea is humbling,” he says, “A place to find and lose oneself.”
Name: Lars Merseburg
Age: 39
Where do you live: East Village, New York
Years surfing: 19 years.
Surfing is: “Gratitude. Nature. Freedom when disconnecting from this wired world.”
Lars Merseburg and his wife Annabel surfed Las Flores in El Salvador last year.
Guiones Surf Photo of the Week
Sometimes any exit is better than no exit. Just watch out for the leash recoil. After being stretched to the limit, the “leg rope” can bring that board back at you with incomprehensible speed. Best to surface with a hand up and face turned away and down: aka “The Catcher’s Mitt”.
photo provided by Surfing Nosara
Cradle It
Want a new way to look at sustainability? Consider the “cradle to cradle” philosophy, which challenges us to reimagine products in a way that they can perpetually be reused or repurposed, therefore creating new “cradles” each time we find a new use.
This is an extremely poor paraphrasing of the seminal 2002 book by William McDonough and Michael Braungart; if you really want to know what it’s all about, read Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, which you can buy used (hence, a new cradle) at Amazon.
The Brown Pelican
A common sight while studying the waves from Playa Guiones, the Brown Pelican glides easily with its friends in a straight line or v-formation, elegantly skimming the surface of the ocean, mimicking the rise and fall of the water. Basically unchanged from ancient pelican fossils, this unique bird has had 30-40 million years to perfect its graceful in-flight maneuvers. The Brown Pelican uses its keen eyesight to spot its next meal and then, unlike other pelican species, folds its wings and dives bill first into the water, using its large beak to scoop up fish near the surface. Internal air sacks beneath the skin help to cushion the impact and bob the bird back up to the surface. Though capable of holding up to 3 gallons, the pelican’s pouch is not a carrying case. Rather, it dips its beak to spill out the water and then throws its head back to swallow the fish. The only potential foil to this technique could be a laughing gull, which has learned to hang out nearby this capable fisherman, sometimes even perching on the pelican’s head, always at the ready to steal the catch of the day.
Alfredo Aguilar
Alfredo Aguilar is the author of Morir dos veces, a collection of stories for which he won the Primer Certamen de Literatura Joven Centroamericana in 1988. “Mint Flowers,” a short story found in this collection, follows the character Manuela as she moves about her town to settle all her affairs before dying. Manuela knows to prepare for her own funeral because she has seen the white mint flowers bloom on her patio; both her father and her grandfather before him died the same day they encountered the “scent of thick clusters of white mint flowers.”
Knowing that the aromatic flowers represent death, Aguilar’s character nevertheless recognizes earth’s beauty and takes care to absorb “every detail of everything in sight.” She reflects:
Surely everything on earth, no matter how ugly, has its beautiful side, even winter with its morning cold that cuts us to our bones, with rain that falls like clockwork and dies drop by drop on the rooftops, lulling us to sleep, and those sad, gray dawns, little children running to school, splashing in puddles, looking up so the rain might fall in their faces…
In this short story, Aguilar balances the mundane and the spiritual, the beauty of life and the foreboding of death. Ultimately, Manuela meets her mint-scented fate with acceptance.
Photo Credit: Sten Porse / CC BY-SA 3.0
Source: Ras, Barbara, ed. Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion. San Francisco: Whereabouts, 1994.
SURFING IS … WITH GITA DHIR
Raised in Columbia, Maryland by an Indian father and German mother, it’s a surprise that Gita Dhir ever found her way to surfing. Now the sporty, brown-eyed beauty says, “Wherever I can find a wave, if I have a board, I’ll get on it.”
Her first attempt at surfing took place in Ocean City, Maryland when she was 18. “I had a boyfriend who gave me a huge foam board with no leash. I had no core strength and it was exhausting because the distance between the shore and the break was immense, and I had to keep swimming after my board.”
She soon got the hang of it, and when she moved to Virginia Beach, she admits she became almost fanatical about it. “I’d surf during hurricanes. Sometimes it was just crazy pants out there,” says Dhir, a physical therapist now based in O’ahu. “One year, I decided to surf every month of the year, including February. The water was so frigid, I felt like I was having a stroke. When I came out of the ocean, I was seeing colored spots everywhere. I was half a step away from hypothermia.”
Dhir has surfed warm waters, too, including San Diego, California, Montauk, Long Island in the summer and Dominical, Costa Rica, but she loves surfing in her newly adopted home – Hawaii. “White Plains beach in Oahu is awesome,” she says. “I was surfing there one morning and could see a storm in the distance. It was misty and the rain skipped over us, but left behind the fattest, most vivid rainbow I’ve ever seen. It was magical.”
As for any scary moments in the water, Dhir recalls one incident which shook her while she was surfing in Virginia Beach: “It was 9/11 and we’d all been sent home early. I needed something good to happen to me because it was such an awful day; we were so numb and shocked. We got into the water and the waves had the calming effect I was looking for. All of a sudden, I saw a fin charging towards me. I paddled for shore as fast as I could. Turns out, there were four sharks. I didn’t get back into the water for 8 months.”
Dhir, now the mother of a 4-year-old named River, describes herself “as a perennial beginner who can catch a lot of waves.” While she was once quite the daredevil – and still plans to surf the inside break of Waimea Bay on the North Shore of O’ahu one day – she’s a bit more cautious now. “Now that I’m a mom, I don’t want to risk my life or break my neck,” she says. “There was a time when I would surf anything.”
Name: Gita Dhir
Age: 47
Where do you live: O’ahu, Hawaii
Years surfing: 29 years.
Surfing is: “Freedom. Escape. Relaxation and mind-clearing. Sometimes it’s the only way I can get away from myself; when I am able to let go of everything.”
